On the 7th May 2012 Paw Print Games re-located in to new offices based in the Steam Mill Business Centre in Chester. Director and Co-Founder Antony White said “this is a great space in a fantastic location with a cool feel and creative vibe”.

Nestled in the middle of Chester’s developing Canal Quarter the Steam Mill is a landmark grade 2 listed building that has recently undergone a comprehensive refurbishment. It sits right next to the canal and in-between some of the best bars and restaurants Chester has to offer. There is easy access to the M53 motorway and the train station is two minutes’ walk away.

“Having a larger office has given us the opportunity to diversify a little" explains Steven Craft, Director and Co-Founder, "Mobile games development is still by far our primary focus, but with Pi, our cross-platform engine that covers many platforms including: Windows, MacOSX, iPhone, iPad, WebOS, Bada, BlackBerry BB7 and BlackBerry BB10 we have found some demand for the development of multi-platform enterprise applications too.”

“With Wacky Rapids currently in localised beta and production scaling up on an un-announced project for a global IP, various smaller projects and our own IP developments the team are super excited about what the future holds” said Antony.

If you happen to be a game developer or involved in the creative industries and can get to Chester on the 26th May then come along to the Game Dev North 4 networking event at The Cellar. Paw Print Games are co-hosts for the evening and registration for the event is free. To register simply add your name to the list here and keep up to date with all future Game Dev North events via the official twitter channel here.

On the 29th April Directors Antony and Steve headed out to BlackBerry World 2012 in Orlando Florida. Monday afternoon saw Steve talk at a conference session headed by Anders Jeppson RIM’s head of gaming about developing for the PlayBook and BlackBerry 10. Steve talked in detail about porting KAMI RETRO to the PlayBook in less than 24 hours. Continuing on from this Steve finished up the session giving a brief glimpse of KAMI RETRO running on the new BlackBerry 10 Alpha unit at its native 1280x768 resolution. Steve said "using the Paw Print Games internal cross-platform engine and tool-chain Pi it only took 20 minutes to author the assets and have it ready for market!".

On the Tuesday night it was over to Universal Studios for the BlackBerry World 2012 party. KAMI RETRO received some great exposure throughout the night appearing on the main event screens and attendees were loving it on the PlayBook pods scattered around the party.

Wednesday saw Antony join a press panel consisting of Michael Shade of FishLabs, Gamelofts Sam Shperling, Alex Caccia of Marmalade, Rob Price of Glitchsoft, Chris Smith of RIM and moderated by Anders Jeppsson to discuss BB10 as a development platform. The general consensus was excitement for the BB10 platform with all involved on the panel committed to supporting the PlayBook and BB10 platform.

Wednesday night was the BBJam10 BBQ at the Hilton Bonnet Creek. There were a number of screens hooked up to PlayBooks with a variety of games for all to play. KAMI RETRO was available on one of the pods and it was getting a lot of attention, even more than the Cut the Rope pod!

Just before flying out to Orlando KAMI RETRO was entered in to the App Circus competition. On the Monday KAMI RETRO was shortlisted in the native category which meant Antony had to pitch the title on the Wednesday afternoon to a panel of judges for final stage selection. By Wednesday dinner time the finalists had been announced with KAMI RETRO being one of three in the Native category.

The Thursday saw Antony pitching KAMI RETRO to a panel of judges and in front of the BlackBerry Jam attendees in the App Circus final. The pitch was a 3 minutes elevator style pitch inclusive of video footage with a few minutes of Q&A from the panel. KAMI RETRO was eventually drawn in second place, unfortunately missing out on the grand prize but receiving great coverage nonetheless.

Game Dev North is a casual monthly gathering of game developers in Chester started by Samuel Mottershaw. The first event was held in February but Paw Print Games were unable to attend. However we managed to get along to the March event which was a great evening of meeting new people, chatting to old friends and coming up with new ideas for the next event. There were various discussions that night on how to evolve the event so Project Static, White Paper Games and Paw Print Games joined Sam to make it bigger.

Firstly we needed to find a venue. We didn’t know how many attendees we were going to be able to get to the event and since it is a casual event with no entry fee we had to find a venue with no hire charge! There were also other factors we wanted to take in to consideration too, such as easy access to the train station, availability of food and the quality of the drinks on offer. We looked at a number of venues before settling on The Cellar in Chester. The Cellar ticked pretty much all of our requirements for this event and if we were to manage over 30 attendees it would be free to hire!

With the venue booked for the 21st April Sam set up the event registration page and we all went about drumming up awareness for Game Dev North 3. It wasn’t long before we had over the 30 attendees required for the free hire and by the time the event came around we had over 90!

On the night there was a great mix of programmers, artists, animators, audio engineers, journalists, publishers and studio heads in attendance. The atmosphere was great, The Cellar provided tons of bacon and facon sandwich’s , the beer was fantastic and a few lucky attendees walked away with one of the great prizes available in the business card draw.

So we are now only a couple of weeks away from Game Dev North 4 organised for the 26th May again at The Cellar in Chester. The twitter channel @GameDevNorth has all the latest news about the event and to attend simply stick your name on the list here.